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August and September were particularly dry across most of the Murray-Darling Basin. Rainfall (July-September) over much of the Basin continued below average or very much below average, with patches of lowest on record in northern NSW.

Fourteen children in and around Mona Vale have developed cancer in the 10 years since a medical supplies company there began discharging a gas associated with the disease, and two of the children live less than a kilometre from the factory. But the company that operated the plant, Unomedical, said no cancers can be attributed to the emission of ethylene oxide, which was listed by the World Health Organisation as a carcinogen, reported The Sydney Morning Herald (14/8/2007, p.1).

The government was trying to sell the APEC summit as producing tangible outcomes, not just an esoteric debate about aspirational goals and no binding targets, reported The Australian Financial Review (10/9/2007, p. 14).

APEC has set specific goals: The government strategy was based on the fact that APEC itself had set energy efficiency and reforestation targets that Foreign Minister Alexander Downer yesterday said were “specific goals that mean things to people”, the newspaper said.

A major step forward? According to The Australian Financial Review: “These goals include reforesting a minimum of 20 million hectares in the Asia-Pacific region by 2020 (which would absorb about 1.4 billion tonnes of carbon, which is 11 per cent of the annual total CO2 emissions of the world) and improving energy efficiency in APEC countries by 25 per cent by 2030.

A Phillipines President Gloria Arroyo welcomed climate change discussions at APEC but said the key forum for final negotiations remained the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change, which next meets in Bali in December. Australian officials had drafted am APEC flexible deal that stopped short of setting long-term goals for emissions reductions, accommodating the concerns of developing APEC countries, reported The Australian (6/9/2007, p. 1). Draft rewritten: Instead, they wanted to put energy efficiency, which involved reducing fuel use to cut greenhouse emissions, as the centrepiece of prime minister John Howard’s APEC climate change initiative. The draft text on Howard’s Sydney Declaration on climate change, which was being debated by officials, had been significantly rewritten since an earlier version was leaked by Greenpeace two weeks ago.

An online reader poll this week had revealed an unprec­edented level of opposition to the pro­posed Tasmanian pulp mill, reported the Wentworth Courier (12/9/2007, p. 7).

Rigorous assessment to be undertaken: “There were 776 responses to our question ‘Should the pulp mill pro­ceed in the Tamar Valley?’ with 98.7 per cent of voters answering ‘No’,” the newspaper reported. “In response to the poll, the federal Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said voters in Wentworth would expect him to undertake a com­prehensive environmental assessment of the project. He said his extended six-week deadline had allowed for that. ‘The assessment process I have put in place with an independent review by the chief scientist has now been acknowledged, even by opponents of the pulp mill, as a thorough and rigor­ous one,’ Mr Turnbull said.”

Fast-tracking challenged: “The figures echo a recent Newspoll in the northern Tasmanian electorate of Bass,” the Wentworth Courier said. “Of a sample of 400 voters the poll found that more than half were against the construction of the mill. Debate over the $2 billion Gunns pulp mill has been played out in Malcolm Turnbull’s electorate after a critical advertisement funded by businessman Geoffrey Cousins. Mr Cousins’ advertisement in the Courier challenged the MP over fast-tracking the environmental assess­ment process of the mill.”

Mill “will have no significant impact” say owners: “Pulp mill company Gunns responded with its own full-page advertisement last week, claiming the residents of Wentworth were being subjected to a campaign of misinformation,” the newspaper reported. “Gunns said the project would have no signifi­cant impact on the local environment or the tourism and wine industries. In a forum at Waverley RSL last week, Greens leader Bob Brown con­demned Gunns’ comments, saying the mill was ‘an absolute assault on the atmosphere of this planet’.”

Don Nardella introduced a petition by residents of Rockbank to the Victorian Legislative Assembly on 22 August 2007.

Significant cost reductions:The petition called for natural gas to be installed in order that residents and local businesses in the Rockbank and surrounding areas could access natural gas supplies. Thanking members of the Rockbank action group for their hard work in organising this petition and bringing it to the house, Nardella said: “The provision of this infrastructure would then make gas readily available and reduce significantly the cost of this important energy resource.”

In a study released by the British journal Nature, the investigators said the so-called Asian Brown Cloud was as much to blame as greenhouse gases for the warming observed in the Himalayas over the past half century, reported The Canberra Times (2/8/2007, p.3).

Glaciers melt now, but droughts loom later: Rapid melting among the 46,000 glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau, the third-largest ice mass on the planet, was already causing downstream flooding. But long-term worries focus more on the danger of drought, as the glaciers shrink. The report triggered an appeal from UN Environment Program chief Achim Steiner, who urged the international community “to ever greater action” on tackling climate change.

UAVs monitor Cloud from above: Researchers led by Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, used an innovative technique to explore the Asian Brown Cloud. The plume sprawls across South Asia, parts of Southeast Asia and the northern Indian Ocean. It spews from tailpipes, factory chimneys and power plants, forests or fields that were being burned for agriculture, and wood and dung which are burned for fuel. Professor Ramanathan’s team used three unmanned aircraft fitted with 15 instruments to monitor temperature, clouds, humidity and aerosols. The remote-controlled craft carried out 18 missions in March 2006, flying in a vertical stack over the Indian Ocean. The planes flew simultaneously through the Brown Cloud at heights of 500m, 1500m and 3000m.

Cloud exacerbates solar heating, melts mountain ice: They discovered that the cloud boosted the effect of solar heating on the air around it by nearly 50 per cent because its particles are soot, which is black and thus absorbs sunlight. The simulation estimated that, since 1950, South Asia’s atmosphere has warmed by 0.25C per decade at altitudes ranging from 2000m to 5000m above sea level – the height where thousands of Himalayan glaciers are located. As much as half of this warming could be attributed to the effects of brown clouds, Professor Ramanathan said.

Biomass burning produces Cloud: Roughly 60 per cent of the soot in South Asia comes from biofuel cooking and biomass burning, which could be eased by helping the rural poor get bottled gas or solar cookers, he said.